Exploring L2 teachers’ knowledge of their impact: Working towards a theoretical model based on pre-service and in-service L2 teachers’ reflective-narrative accounts

Abstract

The research in this dissertation is exploratory in nature: it aims to explore the underlying knowledge that L2 teachers rely on when engaged in and reflecting upon L2 learningteaching as an inherently relational activity, in which the teacher’s impact fundamentally shapes students’ engagement in learning and in the activity itself. In line with this aim, the dissertation positions L2 teachers’ knowledge of their impact (LTKI) as a construct to be used for framing the knowledge that allows L2 teachers to make their classroom impact a favourable one, to engage in ‘relating’ as a specific and regular classroom activity, and thereby to increase the effectiveness of their teaching. Regarding its theoretical focus, the dissertation looks primarily into the historical and paradigmatic roots of how L2 teachers’ knowledge is conceptualised today, as well as into the growing amount of research that seeks to understand the relational processes involved in L2 learning-teaching and the ways in which L2 teachers make sense of these processes. Concurrently, the theoretical chapters (Chapters 1-3) draw attention to the conceptual and terminological disparity that now characterises research into L2 teachers’ sense-making about their roles and impact in L2 learning-teaching as a relational activity, and present LTKI as a more fitting conceptual focus for such research. In setting up this research agenda, the theoretical chapters also lay out the rationale for using L2 teachers’ reflective-narrative accounts as a means to explore and conceptualise the knowledge they relied on while carrying out the reflective activity, and introduce grounded theory as an analytical framework for doing such exploratory work in the qualitative research tradition.